Visitors landing on the site are those who are interested in the products and posses more probability to convert as compared to those who have never visited the site. A visitor leaving the site without any transaction is missed opportunity and as the saying goes "everybody deserves a second chance". Remarketing has brought the new concept of targeting those visitors who had earlier been to the page and had left without transaction.


How Remarketing Works?
Once opted to run campaign as remarketing, Google implants cookies on every visitor those who left the site without any transaction. The length of these cookies could be upto 540 days. A proper campaign targeting should be implemented considering the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of the page where the visitor departed. Both inbound and outbound metrics are to be considered in order to run a successful remarketing campaign. Once the campaigns are set properly ensure the text Ads, images or rather call it as offers being shown to these visitors are lucrative to ensure clicks converting into conversion.

Opting to run in a remarketing would require creation of audience. Three basic type of audience to be considered could be -

• General Visitors
• Visitors Abondning the transaction cart
• Visitors who left didn't enter the transaction cart

Audience creation could be one step towards a successful remarketing campaign but it should also be followed by a lucrative and more impressive creative. Offering discount and using the terms like we missed you, or even the cart is missing you could be certain creatives which are useful. Think out of the box as those visitors who left the site once they were towards their final step of committing transaction is crucial for every industry. Successfully converting even 0.25% of those visitors who left the shopping cart could improve the conversion rate. Targeting visitor for the first 30 days with different Adgroup and later serving them with another AdGroup is also an acceptable option.

In a nutshell, remarketing is a mixture of converting a missed visitor into a customer with a strategic plan, a mindful approach,  targeting the campaigns and delivering a lucrative Ads such that every dollar spend on the remarketing would result into a successful marketing campaign.

Google instant, has redefined the way we search. As we type along suggestions are made by the system, it is indeed helpful and people would tend to rely on the suggestions being provided in the search box. This lead towards less thinking and influence the query as per the suggestion made by Google instant. The main advantage of Google Instant is that there would be less new query and it would also reduce 30-90 seconds typing and  2 to 5 seconds per search. There are 20% new queries seen coming every month and these new queries are search terms which Google system had never recorded.

Google instant also gives the feeling towards he death of long tail keywords. The death of long tail keywords would mean that more competition in popular terms overall increasing the CPC. The google instant also gives the feeling of death of SEO. Well, it won't be a total death but rather an intense competition over the popular query terms.

As we are moving towards an instant era of search engine, the results are displayed in the search box and the resultant page changes instantly. One important thing to note for Adowrds advertiser is that as the user types, the suggestion are placed in the search box. If the user stops typing for more than 3 seconds those partial query displayed in the search box in grey color are the terms that would appear on the Search Quer Results (SQR).

PPC - Pay Per Click - Every Dollar spent for every visitors brought via SEM model. The basic concept in PPC revolves around keyword. The art of advertising via PPC is straight forwad. Get the keywords, associate with AdCopy and bind these as an Adgroup. These Adgroup should belong to its parent Campaign with proper location and language targeting. Initially a campaign must run in CPC mode.

There are different bidding strategy for PPC -

• CPC (Cost Per Click) Model
• Auto Bidding
• Manual Bidding
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) Model.
• Target CPA
• Max CPA

The difference between CPC and CPA mode is that a campaign cannot opt into CPA mode until and unless it has 30 Conversion in last 30 days. CPC model is straight forward and for every search query where the keywords are eligible for an auction the ads would appear. A click over these ads would lead towards a cost resulting a visitor for the site.

It is mandatory to have the conversion tracking installed on the thank you page such that it could be measured by Google. Google Adword system starts learning the conversion under the environment they occurred and starts building intelligence. Once these CPC campaigns are eligible for migration to CPA an option button is available. The transformation from CPC to CPA occurs as per the value suggested by the Google Adwords at the campaign level. This suggested value is merely used for a smooth transition as they are used as a default value for the Adgroup. The keyword CPC is stored just in case the advertiser wish to switch back to CPC mode.

Target CPA is the indication of amount of money the advertiser is willing to pay per conversion, the target CPA is always respected and it would not incur over +-10% of the target CPA. While on the other end, Max CPA would work under the model where it is allowed to spend maximum amount indicated. Hence every other auction where there is eligibility for conversion in an auction the Ads would not be displayed once the max CPA has been achieved for the day.

The CPA is always respected and the ads are displayed considering various criteria such as origin of the visitor, time the ads is competing in an auction, browser setting etc. To improve the performance these PPC metrics should be measured constantly.

Which Model should we Chose?
CPA model is more or less a indication that the advertiser trust the Google Adwords system and let the adwords system decide when, where and which position Ad would be displayed. The advertiser has to completely rely on the system and there would be less maintenance on the advertisers end. There is no bidding required for keyword rather there is a need to update the CPA bid and review SQR (Search Query Result). The CPA is seen as Adgroup bidding  strategy.


Precaution when running in CPA:

• Ensure that the conversion tracking code is placed across all the pages as the CPA model relies on conversion.
• It is not a good practice to switch CPC to CPA and vice versa.
• Periodic update of the CPA bid is essential for the advertiser.

CPC model is directly associated over keywords bidding strategy where user controls the bid over all the keywords. The Ads would always participate in the auction provided that there is enough budget and the search query triggering the ads are eligible to participate. SQR, Keyword Bid management are sole responsibility of the advertiser would have to dedicate more effort as compared to CPA model.

Regardless it be CPC or CPA a constant monitoring over the traffic, conversion  along with its main metrics is a must. Benchmark data and understanding PPC metrics which drives performance are vital towards success of any Campaign.

Please read more about CPA bidding strategy.

PPC focus should not be only ROI but also the factor influencing the growth of better performing campaign and optimizing the bad ones to make it profitable. There are various drivers involved in driving the pay per click –

• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Average Position (Ad Rank)
• Quality Score
• Impression Share
• Bounce Rate
• Conversion Rate

These above metrics play are the most important part in improving campaign and its performance. As holiday season approaches we should expect more traffic. These traffic should be optimize so the overall KPI of the SEM is met. Measuring the success of online advertising is defended by the popularity of the ads being served to public which in return would deliver conversion.

Click Through Rate (CTR): Number of Clicks/Number of Impressions
To measure the performance of the adtext CTR plays the most important role. This metrics helps evaluate the interest of the person willing to buy the product. Having a lower CTR would help understand the importance message being delivered to the audience is not impressive to engage them to visit the website. Hence action should be taken to improve the Adtext.

Average Position (Ad Rank): CPC Bid * Quality Score
The actual position of the Ad being displayed in the search page.The position of the Ad is calculated based on Quality Score and the CPC bid which the advertiser is willing to pay. Total clicks accrued could vary by position. 

Quality Score: Average Position (Ad Rank)/CPC Bid ) + Other Factors
Computation of Quality Score involves various metrics and is a range between 1 to 10 where 1 being the poorest and 10 being the best. Higher the quality score lower the CPC. Factors involved in computing Quality score is mentioned below:

• Historical Performance of CTR and Accounts
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• URLS of the AdGroup
• Ad Copy Relevance
• Relevancy of the Keywords with the Ad Group
• Relevancy of the Keyword matched with the Ad and the Search Query
• Quality of the Landing Page
• Loading Time of the Landing Page
• Geographical Considerations where the Adwill be shown
• Other Factors

 
Conversion Rate:Total Goals Met/Total Visitors
 An indication for the quality of the clicks being bought. Higher conversion rate indicates that the quality of the clicks are good and the right product is being offered to the visitors. A goal could vary from industry to industry, a registration could  be consider a conversion for one company while purchase could be goal for another. It should always be in the norms of advertisers to improve conversion rate.

Impression Share: Total  Market Impression - Total Impression where Ad participated
It indicates the share of voice in the category the competition where the auction participated. Once the account is set the category of arena to be competed is chosen, the ads are displayed in the same category and impression share indicates the lost of opportunity due to impressions share. These loss of opportunity could be due to budget limitation or could be due to poor quality score.

Bounce Rate: Total Visits on the Page - Total Visitors left without any activity on the Page
It is one of the most important metrics for any online business. It indicates the visitors interest over the page once he landed on it. If the user leaves without any activity or viewing any other pages of the site it would be an indication that the information which he was looking was not found on the page. Lower the bounce rate better the page would be.

All these above metrics are a proper way of evaluating the performance  the Campaign. The success, failure and the improvement of the campaign could be made if the above metrics are measured effectively. To measure the metrics properly it should always be considered with the industry specific benchmark. Nevertheless the trend over the period of time could also indicate the performance of the campaign.